I suspect a trick…

With a tip of the fedora for Janie Sheppard…
The big question is why would DDR want to change the zoning to build a mall these days? The economy tells us quite clearly that malls and shopping centers are not the way to go. Mall developers including DDR are all in serious financial trouble, as we can see here:

Fitch also downgraded $555 million in preferred stock to “BB+” from “BBB-,” sending it into non-investment grade, or “junk,” status. It assigned a negative outlook to the new ratings, implying another downgrade could be forthcoming. Fitch also said the company would have a liquidity shortfall of $300 million through the end of 2010 due to limited availability under the company’s revolving credit facilities and debts coming due in 2010. Last week, the company was removed from the Standard &amp; Poor’s 500 Index due to a low market capitalization.

Holy smokes! Here is a company spiraling down to worthlessness that wants to spend a huge amount of money to convince voters to change the zoning for the Masonite property they bought to build a mall. This doesn’t seem to make any sense, just considering their own financial problems. In the past year DDR’s stock has plummeted from a high in 2007 of around $70 per share to a low of under $2 a share as of March, 2009. Nosing around a little bit more, we find that In December, 2008, another article noted that:

Mall culture in the United States — at least as we know it — is coming to an end.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — General Growth Properties Inc. , the second largest mall owner in the United States–whose stock trades for 55 cents, down from $44 last May, extended its plea for forbearance on more than $2 billion in debt, after the troubled mall operator failed to convince enough of its bondholders to give it more time to regain its financial footing by Monday’s deadline.

Just yesterday I read in Time magazine the same story:

The American mall is suffering a slow painful death… the international Council of Shopping Centers predicts that 73,000 stores will close their doors in the first half of 2009 and another group, The Strategic Resources Group, predict as many as 3000 shopping centers to close or go bankrupt this year.

And yet another source:

Georgia Tech professor Ellen Dunham-Jones, coauthor of the forthcoming book “Retrofitting Suburbia,” which focuses on the decline of malls and other commercial strips. Today, nearly a fifth of the country’s largest 2,000 regional malls are failing, she says, and according to the International Council of Shopping Centers, and a record 150,000 retail outlets, including such mall mainstays as the Gap and Foot Locker, will close this year.” [Newsweek]

“Curiouser and curiouser”. Why would this near bankrupt company want to spend a lot of cash to change the zoning? I doubt if they have a mall planned. Although we have seen titans of high finance topple because of stupid and risky moves, it would be utterly stupid to invest in a mall in these times, but I guess that it could be a possibility. But I would bet that there is another answer.

I suspect it is a trick. I doubt they will build a mall or are even thinking about it. They want to trick us into believing that they will be bringing money to the county with low paying jobs and some taxes with their “mall”. But… as we see above, this company needs cash badly and they need to change the zoning in order to get more money for the real estate.

The Zoning change here was a bad idea in the first place, but zoning change for an illusion is worse. Once you cover up Agricultural and Industrial land with houses and malls, you can’t get it back.
~~

2 Comments

An answer to the comment about the DDR piece:
That is the mystery. My guesses are that retail property might be worth more than ag/industrial in any case and they seem to need cash. This company might also believe they are “too big to fail” and they certainly are big. They also might think that “these hicks” cannot make a company like us back off.
In any case, I believe that the present zoning is worth more to us in the county to have space for manufacturing and local agriculture, both of which create real wealth. Check out my update to the piece about Ukiah setting up a feed-in tariff system to promote solar for homeowners and small business.
If that did happen we might even get some solar manufacturers here.

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THE SMALL ORGANIC FARM greatly discomforts the corporate/ industrial mind because the small organic farm is one of the most relentlessly subversive forces on the planet. Over centuries both the communist and the capitalist systems have tried to destroy small farms because small farmers are a threat to the consolidation of absolute power.

Thomas Jefferson said he didn’t think we could have democracy unless at least 20% of the population was self-supporting on small farms so they were independent enough to be able to tell an oppressive government to stuff it.

It is very difficult to control people who can create products without purchasing inputs from the system, who can market their products directly thus avoiding the involvement of mercenary middlemen, who can butcher animals and preserve foods without reliance on industrial conglomerates, and who can’t be bullied because they can feed their own faces. ~Eliot Coleman

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The whole world is made of incredibly tiny things, much too small to be visible to the naked eye — and yet none of the myths or so-called holy books that some people, even now, think were given to us by an all-knowing god, mentions them at all! In fact, when you look at those myths and stories, you can see that they don't contain any of the knowledge that science has patiently worked out. They don't tell us how big or how old the universe is; they don't tell us how to treat cancer; they don't explain gravity or the internal combustion engine; they don't tell us about germs, or anesthetics. In fact, unsurprisingly, the stories in holy books don't contain any more information about the world than was known to the primitive peoples who first started telling them! If these 'holy books' really were written, or dictated, or inspired, by all-knowing gods, don't you think it's odd that those gods said nothing about any of these important and useful things? -Richard Dawkins

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